Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
I paid close attention to the analysis making the rounds that Tinubu will secure a second term by mining 7, even 10, million votes out of the South West. And my first question was not whether the figure is reachable. My first question was simpler. Why is a sitting President, an incumbent with the whole machinery of state in his hands, suddenly scouring one zone for a number on that scale? You do not need to wait for anyone to answer. The answer is written on the wall in one word. Panic. Panic that the vote which actually made him President, the vote of the North, is about to walk away.
And let me confess something to you plainly. That fear is not imagined. It is certain.
A man who must import 7 million votes from one corner of the country is a man who already knows he has lost the rest.
THE VOTES THAT VANISHED
Go back and look at the raw numbers, and the collapse tells its own story. In 2015, the APC, then carrying Muhammadu Buhari, polled 15,424,921 votes, as declared by INEC. In 2019, still under Buhari, the party polled 15,191,847. Then came 2023. The same party, now carrying Bola Tinubu, managed only 8,794,726.
Read those figures again slowly. From above 15 million in two straight cycles, the APC crashed to under 9 million. That is a fall of roughly 6.4 million votes between 2019 and 2023 alone. 6.4 million. Not shaved, not trimmed. Nearly halved.
This is the inconvenient truth the propagandists will never place beside their fantasy projections. The party did not grow into 2023. It bled into 2023. And a party that bled 6 million votes while sitting on the fattest side of power does not suddenly find 10 million fresh ones in a single zone while the country starves.
THE LAGOS FALLACY THAT NO LONGER SELLS
Understand where the northern vote came from in the first place, and you understand why it is leaving. The North was sold a story. The story was that this man built Lagos, that Lagos is his personal miracle, and that by exporting the so called Lagos model he would build Nigeria the same way. It was an exaggerated impression then, and time has exposed it as a pure marketing fallacy now.
Because the model has been applied. The nation has lived under it. And what has the model delivered? Hunger. Misery. An inflation figure that INEC cannot soften, hovering around 15.9 per cent in mid 2026, with food inflation biting even harder. A minimum wage of 70,000 naira that the market has crushed to the value of loose change. Roughly 6 in every 10 Nigerians pushed below the poverty line by the World Bank’s own reckoning. This is the model in action.
You cannot govern a people into agony for four years and then ask them to renew the agony out of sentiment.
The confidence the North placed in the Lagos myth has been shattered by the daily experience of the very people who gave the votes. And that shattered confidence does not return with a slogan. It returns as a subtracted number on collation day.
WHO ACTUALLY MADE HIM PRESIDENT
Now let us settle the question the palace never wants settled. Where did the 8,794,726 actually come from in 2023?
By the INEC spread, the North carried him, not the South West. Of his 8,794,726 votes, 5,587,757 came from the North, the 19 northern states and Abuja together. The North West alone handed him 2,652,824, and mark this well, that is more than his own South West gave him, and it was in that same North West that he defeated Atiku, a son of the North, 2,652,824 to 2,329,540, a margin of around 323,000 on Atiku’s own ground. His home zone, the South West, delivered only 2,279,407. From the entire South South he took 799,957. And from the South East, the zone he now governs, he managed just 127,605 in all, barely one per cent of the vote, a handful of thousands in states like Enugu and Anambra.
And it reconciles to the last ballot. Take his entire South. His 2,279,407 from the South West, 799,957 from the South South, and 127,605 from the South East come to 3,206,969 from the whole southern half of the country, his own zone included. Subtract that from 8,794,726 and what remains, 5,587,757, is what the North handed him. Add it all together and you arrive back at 8,794,726, not one vote more. So the North alone gave him well over 1.5 times his entire southern harvest. This was never a Western mandate. It was a northern one.
And look harder at that North West, because the detail is damning. Of the zone’s 7 states, Atiku actually won 4, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi and Sokoto. Kwankwaso took 1, his native Kano. Tinubu won only 2, Jigawa and Zamfara. Yet the man who carried just 2 states was somehow posted ahead of the man who carried 4. How does a candidate outscore, across a whole zone, a rival who beat him outright in twice as many of its states? Win more states, and still lose the count. That is not the shape of a clean result. The inescapable inference, the one the propagandists will never confront, is that Atiku’s numbers were suppressed and the figures fattened in the units where it mattered. That is how you manufacture a zone you did not win.
So let the record show it in his own results. Tinubu did not ride into Aso Rock on the shoulders of the West. He was carried there by the North he now takes for granted. Strip that northern haul of 5,587,757 out of that tally and there is no President Tinubu. None.
That is the true architecture of 2023. And it is precisely that architecture that is now crumbling under his feet.
AND THE NORTH THAT ATIKU ALREADY HELD
Now turn the same lens on Atiku, and the picture should rob the APC strategists of their sleep. In that very same 2023 election, Atiku Abubakar drew 5,233,473 votes from the North. And he drew them under the harshest conditions any northern candidate has ever faced.
He did it while five governors of his own party and their structures worked against him from within. He did it while Rabiu Kwankwaso’s NNPP carried off close to 1 million votes in Kano alone, votes that in any ordinary contest would have thickened the main opposition’s northern column. He did it while every northern APC governor threw the dead weight of federal incumbency against him. And still, out of a North divided against itself, he pulled 5,233,473.
That is the number to fix in your mind. That 5,233,473 was Atiku’s floor in a hostile, fractured North. Not his ceiling. His floor.
Now watch what 2027 takes away from Tinubu. It takes away the division, because Atiku is the only presidential candidate the North can call its own, while Tinubu, Obi and Makinde are all sons of the South. It takes away the illusion, because the APC’s northern votes, 5,587,757 of them, were never votes of affection, they were votes for a promise, and that promise has curdled into hunger, insecurity and blood. Those votes have no natural home left but the northern candidate himself.
Set the disillusionment of the North beside its consolidation behind its own son, and the projection is not timid, it is conservative. On this arithmetic, Atiku cannot poll less than 9 million votes from the North in 2027. 9 million is not the dream. 9 million is the floor.
A man who scored above 5 million from a North that was fighting him does not score less when that same North turns to fight for him.
THE IMPOSSIBLE SEVEN MILLION
Here is where the arithmetic of the propagandists dies. They promise 7 to 10 million South West votes. But the entire South West, every candidate combined, produced only about 4 million votes in 2023. Every single ballot cast for Tinubu, Atiku, Obi and the rest across the whole zone added up to roughly 4 million.
You cannot pull 7 million votes out of a zone that has never cast 7 million votes for all candidates put together. You cannot pour 10 litres from a 4 litre keg. The projection is not ambition. It is fiction dressed as strategy.
And it grows more impossible still, because 2027 is not 2023. In 2027 the southern vote fractures three ways. Tinubu holds a part of the South West on the APC ticket. Peter Obi carries the South East and the youth on the NDC. Seyi Makinde stands on the APM. Three southern candidates dividing one southern pot. Meanwhile Atiku Abubakar stands as the only presidential candidate from the North, and a wounded, disappointed North gathers behind its own.
The South splits its house three ways while the North closes ranks behind one man. That is the whole election in a single sentence.
THE NEXT COLLAPSE IS ALREADY LOADED
So do the honest calculation. If the APC vote could fall by 6.4 million between 2019 and 2023, while the party still held every lever of federal power and the hardship had not yet fully landed, by how much does it fall in 2027, now that the misery is total and the northern faith is broken?
Can Tinubu even reach half of what the North gave him in 2023? On the evidence, hardly. And once the North withdraws even a portion of that 5,587,757, no phantom 7 million from the South West can be conjured to replace it, because that 7 million has never existed and will not begin to exist now.
Can Tinubu deliver 7 million from the South West in 2027? Capital NO.
THE GOVERNORS DO NOT OWN THE VOTES
So they fall back on their last comfort. The APC now holds 31 of the 36 states, they say, the governors have crossed over, the structure is theirs. Let them count their governors. Governors do not cast the votes. The people do.
Go back to 2023 and see what the almighty incumbent governor was actually worth. In state after state, sitting APC governors threw the whole machinery of office behind Tinubu, and the people handed those states to Atiku anyway. Kaduna went to Atiku under Nasir El-Rufai, the loudest northern drummer for Tinubu. Katsina went to Atiku under its APC governor. So did Kebbi. So did Yobe. So did Gombe. That is 5 states with APC governors in the saddle, in full command of the treasury and the apparatus, and the ballot still walked past them to Atiku.
And the sharpest proof sits in Lagos. Tinubu, with his own man in the Government House, lost Lagos itself, the fortress he has held since 1999, to Peter Obi. If a man cannot make his own governor deliver his own home, what is a governor worth?
A governor can command a government house. He cannot command a hungry man’s thumb.
So ask the real question. If the power of incumbency could not stop Atiku in 2023, when the suffering was only beginning, what will it stop in 2027, now that the suffering is total? The governors who scampered into the APC carried their ambitions across, not their people. Their people are in the market with empty hands, in the fuel queue, in the dark under a dead grid, and no governor alive can order them to smile through it. That anger does not obey a party memo. It obeys the ballot.
This is the fact the APC dreads and dares not say aloud. The suffering of the masses has grown larger than the reach of any governor. And on 16 January 2027, that suffering has one clean and lawful place to answer, against the government that inflicted it.
OSUN, AND THE PYRRHIC EMBRACE
Watch their conduct and the desperation confesses itself. They threw everything into winning Osun, because they needed a southern trophy to prop up the collapsing story. And Osun said no. On 16 August 2026, INEC declared Ademola Adeleke re elected, 511,067 votes to the APC candidate’s 444,815, a margin of over 66,000, 19 local governments out of 30.
Having failed to seize the state at the ballot, they suddenly discovered the value of Adeleke’s courtesy. Reports of a congratulatory call and warm words are now paraded as an endorsement of the President. But an endorsement harvested after you were beaten at the poll is a consolation, not a conquest. It is a pyrrhic embrace. You do not celebrate a handshake from the man who just defeated your candidate on his own soil. You mourn quietly and call it strategy.
A NEW PARTY? SO WAS THE ONE THAT SWEPT THEM IN
When the arithmetic corners them, they reach for the last excuse in the drawer. The ADC, they sniff, is only a new party. As if the age of a logo ever decided an election.
Then explain Osun. Adeleke did not win on some ancient, towering platform. He won on Accord, a small and unfancied party most Nigerians could not have picked out a year ago. And the APC did not go quietly. It threw the whole weight of the centre at him, the federal muscle, the intimidation, even the freezing of the state’s accounts in the middle of the campaign. Accord beat them anyway. A small party dismantled the ruling juggernaut on ground the APC had marked for itself.
So spare us the sermon on new parties. Parties do not win elections. People win elections, and they ride to victory on whatever vehicle they choose. Cast your mind back only to 2015, when the APC itself was a party of barely 2 years’ standing, and it swept a sitting President out of Aso Rock. The vehicle is never the point. The multitude behind it is.
It is not the age of the party that wins. It is the weight of the people behind it.
And the weight behind Atiku is not in question. The suffering masses have found their man, and their support is overwhelming, not manufactured in any government house but rising from the pain in home after home. In the North it has already stopped being a movement and become a tsunami. You do not argue a tsunami down with the date on a party register. You brace, or you are swept away.
THE BATTLE MUST BE TAKEN TO THE UNITS
Let me be clear, and let no comrade mistake confidence for complacency. Atiku Abubakar is winning this election. The arithmetic points one way, and it points to him.
But arithmetic on paper is not victory on the ground. A winning position badly defended is a lost position. So the battle must now be taken to the units. Every ward. Every polling unit. Every single voter reached, registered in our count, mobilised, and guarded through collation. All hands on deck, from the national to the last booth in the last village.
And above all, the narrative must be won before the first ballot is cast. We must plant the truth of these numbers in every mind, so that when the propagandists chant their fantasy of 7 million ghosts, the people already know the votes do not exist. Win the story first. The result will follow.
They are hunting votes that vanished. We are counting a country that is ready. 153 days to 16 January 2027.
The votes he is looking for are not lost. They were never there.
AtikuIsComing #TakeItToTheUnits #EveryVoteCounts #ADC2027
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
17 August 2026
